Finally! My first bag of 2014 Calbees at lunch in the office

 It has been more than a week since Calbee officially released its 2014 set.  And we are already several days into the 2014 regular season.  Until today, however, I have been completely unsuccessful in my efforts to obtain an actual bag of 2014 Calbee Yakyuu chips.

I have looked long and hard.  Pretty much every conbini or grocery store I have passed by (and there have been a lot) I have gone in and taken a look through their snack sections.  Every time it was the same: a bunch of bags of non-baseball-card-having chips. 

Just when I was about to give up hope of ever getting a bag, however, today it started raining.  This forced me to abandon my plans to have Chinese (long walk) and get lunch at the last place I would have thought to look for yakyuu chips: a university Co-op store. 

The second I wandered in I did a double take: they had a rack full of 2014 yakyuu chips right there near the front entrance!  I was so excited I almost forgot to buy my lunch.

Anyway, I bought the bag and went back to my office for lunch, which I am currently eating while writing this post.  The sandwich I bought sucks, but the yakyuu chips are great.  As has been usual in recent years, the 2014 Calbees come with 2 cards per bag:

Opening them up I am pleased to see that I got Yuya Hasegawa, who had a big breakout year for Fukuoka last year, winning the batting title and coming a hair shy of reaching the 200 hit mark:

The design of the cards on the front is basically identical to last year`s.  The backs are slightly different from 2013, but I think they basically recycle the back design from another recent set that I can`t recall off the top of my head.  Maybe 2012 or 2010?  I know I have seen this type of card back before.

Anyway, I`m glad that my 2014 Calbee set has finally begun.  I`ll see how far I get with the first series.  Unfortunately the bags are a bit more expensive this year - 98 yen.  The consumption tax just went up 3% on Monday, which probably contributed to that, so it might cost me a bit more than last year (which as usual I came nowhere near finishing)!

A Pile of 1975 Topps Commons

 Coming home from work to find a box full of vintage baseball cards from the 50s, 60s and 70s has arrived in the mail is a pretty hard feeling to beat!  I bought a lot of about 500 cards on Ebay a couple of weeks ago.  The shipping ended up costing twice what the actual price of the cards were, but it was worth it to get these babies.

 The majority of the cards were from the early to mid 70s and included a smattering of hall of famers (Johnny Benches from the 1970 and 1977 set being the highlights) but were for the most part commons. 

I love flipping through lots like this.  I remember in the early 90s when I started trying to collect vintage cards.  Nobody sold them in lots back then and of course Ebay didn`t exist so you were forced to go to shops and shows buying them one at a time for high Beckett price since they were so in demand and hard to find at the time.  This one box, which cost me less than $50 with shipping, has more vintage cards in it than I was able to accumulate (at much greater cost) during my 1989-1993 peak collecting years combined.  1990 Sean would be so jealous of 2014 Sean if he could see me getting these.

Included in the lot were about 60 cards from the 1975 set. 

That set seems to divide collectors pretty sharply - you either love it or hate it, no middle ground.  I am decidedly on the side of loving the set.  I can see some of the criticisms as being valid - the borders are really big and the photography is pretty weak in general.  But man do I love those colorful borders.  This set just looks reallly cool when you hold it in your hand because of them. 

I also like the bold font used on the team names at the top:

And scattering them about the dining room table they make an excellent collage:

This lot didn`t have any Hall of Famers, though it did have Dick Allen and Luis Tiant who I think are both pretty solid Hall of Very-Gooders.  It also had 3 cards of my beloved Montreal Expos:

 I also kind of like the way that they varied the color patter for teams rather than making them all the same.

I`ll probably write something about my 1972s at some point, that being the other big colorful 70s set that people either love or hate and which I also got a ton of in there.

The Economic Irrationality of Sports Card Magazine

 Sports Card Magazine is Japan`s version of Beckett.   It is a monthly about sports (mostly baseball) cards that includes a price guide.

I haven`t actually bought one of these in a few years, the one in the photo above is from 2005 which I just picked up at random at a used book store for 100 yen.  The only time I bought one new was in 2002.  At the time I was living in Himeji and a sports card store had just opened up downtown.  I used to go there after work a lot and bought packs of 2002 BBM from them pretty regularly, I came close to finishing both series entirely through packs.  My business wasn`t quite enough to keep the store going though and it was closed by 2003, thus putting an end to my foray into baseball card collecting for a while.

Anyway, to get back to the magazine, I only bought one copy of it for two reasons.  One is that it cost 1000 yen, which is a bit pricey.  More importantly though is the fact that the prices in it just make no sense at all.  Nothing in it makes sense.

 I noticed this at the time.  Take a look at the 2002 BBM set for example.  Common cards are listed as being worth between 50 and 80 yen each. 

That is about 50 to 80 cents each for common cards in a very common set.  Every set they list the common cards as being worth at least 50 yen each, no matter how easy they are to find or how much demand there is for them.

Now a pack of 2002 BBM with ten cards in it cost only 200 yen, or 20 yen per card.  So by Sports Card Magazine logic, if you got a pack entirely filled with nothing but commons you would still be getting between 500 and 800 yen worth of cards.  What?

When I read criticisms of Beckett pricing and how it bears no resemblence to reality I always have to laugh.  You Americans think Beckett is bad?  That is amateur hour.  If Sports Card Magazine was pricing American cards, your 1991 Donruss commons would be worth 50 cents each and a complete set of 1989 Topps would probably be listed for about the same as the blue book value of a recent model Toyota Corrola. 

I really have no idea what they think is driving the price of these cards.  I mean, I bought a 3200 card box of random BBM cards including stars a few months ago for 2000 yen (about 20 bucks), which works out to less than 1 yen each. These are not rare cards nor would anyone be well advised to be paying that much for them. Also, valueing these cards so high actually kind of undervalues cards which are actually hard to find and might be worth that much.  Calbee commons from the extremely hard to find sets of the early-mid 1990s they price only slightly higher (100 yen each mostly).  Those cards are several orders of magnitude harder to find, and much more sought after, than BBM cards from mass produced sets and yet according to Sports Card Magazine they are only worth 20-50% more. 

The next logical question is do dealers actually price cards that way?  Actually, some of them do.  Which begs the question of whether or not anyone actually buys them.  I could see buying one or two to finish your set at that price, but that would be it.  And dealers can`t survive off of the odd one or two collectors buying the odd one or two cards for 50 to 80 yen each, so why would they even bother stocking these?

OK, this is making my head spin a bit.  I haven`t bought a copy of Sports Card Magazine in a long time, I`m not sure if they are still this bad or not.  Some of the articles are at least kind of interesting, but that is about all I can say for it!

550 Calbee cards from the 1970s

Sadly these are not mine.

I was just browsing on Yahoo Auctions and came across this listing.  550 Calbee cards from the 1970s.  The current bid is up to 15,500 yen (about $160) and I expect it will go way higher than that by the time it is finished.  According to the description there are a few doubles and the condition varies, though the ones in the picture look pretty good.

I have never seen so many vintage Calbees in a big pile like that before, so I thought it was kind of impressive.  Calbees from the 1970s usually sell only 1 or 2 at a time on Yahoo Auctions, I`ve never seen a lot of more than 50  before.

If I had the money to spend I would love to bid on these because the per-card price will probably end up being pretty reasonable and I would LOVE to be able to flip through those.  My collection is sadly pretty short on Calbees  from the 1970s, I only have about a dozen or so cards from that era.  I`m guessing this will go for at least 50,000 yen, in which case it would blow my baseball card budget for pretty much the whole year in one go, so I`ll have to give it a miss!

Also as a side note there is something I really love about what the seller did with this photo.  I don`t know if it was intentional or not.  1970s and 80s Calbee sets are notorious for being overloaded with Giants players.  In some sets the Giants almost have as many cards as all the other teams combined. 

Notice that the photo has 8 cards arranged on top and not a single one of them is a Giants player!  This guy might be a fellow anti-Giant!  Or it could just be coincidence, but I think not.

The Real Mr. Baseball?

Mr. Baseball starring Tom Selleck has long been one of my favorite movies about both baseball and Japan.  I`m not sure why that is.  As a comedy, its only somewhat funny with most of the gags being pretty obvious and I don't think I ever laughed out loud at it.  As a sports drama its not quite up there with the classics in the genre.  Still though, this is one of my faves. 

I may be biased since it was filmed in Nagoya and I live there, but I think its mostly because its just an enjoyable movie that does a decent job of simplifying differences between Japanese and American cultures. That is a delicate thing to get right without being offensive or annoying.  I sometimes compare it with Selleck`s Magnum P.I.  I love the character of Magnum, but if you ever watch an episode when they have an `Asian` guest star then you are going to see an example of how awful it can be when they get that balance wrong.  Those episodes are cringe-inducingly awful.

Another good thing about the film is that it is mostly filmed on location.  They actually went to Dragons games and filmed the fans in the stands.  Hardly any of it was shot in a studio and so you get a pretty good look at 1992 Japan in the movie, which gives it a more authentic feel than others.

Anyway, I have a baseball card in my 1987 Calbee set that features a player named `Gary` (no other name given) who bears an uncanny resemblence to Selleck`s Jack Elliot character.  Almost every detail is right.  He is wearing a Chunichi Dragons hat which has the same design as the one they wore in the film (they have since changed the logo a few times).  He has dark hair and a Magnum moustache.  Even the look in his eyes says "Yup, my girlfriend is the daughter of the manager and we went through a rough patch after I found out but, you know, its all good now."

I have no idea who Gary was, or even what his full name is.  I wonder though if his stint with the Dragons was anything like Jack Elliot's.  Did he not want to be in Japan at first, but then have a change of heart?  Did he lay down the sac bunt for the team in a clutch situation even though his instinct told him to swing away?

These questions come to me as I look at this card.  Perhaps one day we will learn the truth of the real Mr. Baseball.

My 1987 Calbee Set and the Difficulty of Collecting Japanese Cards from the 80s

Behold my partially complete set of 1987 Calbees.  It is the crown jewel of my Japanese baseball card collection and the only vintage set that I am anywhere near close to actually finishing.

Close is I guess a relative term, I have about 3/4 of them so there are still plenty to go.   I keep track of them the old fashioned way, with a hand written paper checklist that I mark off with each one I get:

I started on this quest a couple years ago when I bought a starter set of 60 different cards.  Since then I have been painstakingly tracking them down one by one, which is the only way to find them.  I love doing this because I feel it is the closest you can get to a `pure` baseball card collecting challenge these days.  There aren`t any gimmicky rare insert cards to track down, it is all just about finishing the set.  They are hard enough to find that it poses a challenge - singles pop up every now and then, usually just a handful at a time, and I have to whip out my checklist and go through them to find ones I want.  At best I might luck into 3 or 4 that I need at a time.

Fortunately despite their rarity, the prices aren`t too steep.  I pay on average between 50 and 100 yen per card, a bit more than that for some of the short printed ones (the Japanese collector term for those is レアブロック - `rare block`). 

 The 1987 set is probably the ideal vintage set to try to collect.  Unlike some of the other pre-1990 sets it doesn`t have any near-impossible to find cards (the 1989 set in contrast is notorious for those). Also the player selection is pretty good.  If you have read Robert Whiting`s You Gotta Have Wa, he wrote that shortly after 1987 so a lot of the players mentioned are in it.  That includes some former MLB stars who only played in Japan for one season like Ben Oglivie (Kintetsu Buffaloes):

 And Bob Horner with the Yakult Swallows:

In terms of condition, 1980s Calbees are very hard to find in top shape.  My set has a fair number with corner wear and other blemishes.  As I`ve mentioned before, I`m pretty flexible about condition with older cards, I just try to avoid ones with heavy creases or names written on the backs of them (which a lot of Calbee cards from the 80s have).

There is a Japanese collector who is trying to finish all the Calbee sets from the `mini card` years that lasted throughout the 1980s, right up to the 1990 set, and kept an interesting blog about it.  I thought some of what he said was interesting enough to be given an English explanation, so I thought I`d mention a few of the highlights.

According to him, the easiest sets from those years to collect are, in order:

1990 Calbee - due to its small size, they only released 55 cards that year.

1986 Calbee - There are only 250 cards in total, which is a reasonably small number, and none of them  were short printed.  The Kiyohara rookie card and Ochiai cards sell for a bit, but otherwise there aren`t any particularly expensive cards in the set.

1987 Calbee - The cards between number 76 and 100 are short printed, but they aren`t too hard to find relative to short printed cards in other sets from the 80s.  There are some parrallel cards , but he doesn`t take those into account.

The above 3 sets are the ones that collectors have the most realistic shot at being able to complete.  He also mentions the 1981 set as being only somewhat harder, with more short printed cards (201 to 250, 401 to 450), but that they can still be found, while a couple of other series (1 to 50, 150 to 199) are a bit tough to find.

In contrast he puts the 1989 Calbee set as the hardest to complete. The gold border cards from 391 to 414 are incredibly hard to find, with some people expressing mixed opinion as to whether they were eveer actually available in packs at all, or just distributed as presents to people who contacted the company.

His blog has a few other interesting bits and pieces, I might introduce some more later.  Anyway, for now I am content to just focus on my 1987 set!

Blog....ON! 2014 Baseball Card Collecting Season has Begun

 The blog is back!  As always happens in about November I tend to put my baseball card collection to the side when the season ends and distract myself over the winter months with other pursuits.  This naturally spills over into blogging about baseball cards, hence the lack of recent posts.

In about February each year though I start to get a bit antsy about things.  Sometimes in Japan you get these days in February when the climate plays tricks on you - throwing you the odd sunny day with a daytime high of about 15 degrees.  Spring weather.  It throws my internal clock completely off and makes me think of springtime activities, which ever since childhood has meant baseball.

Being too old to play baseball anymore (except maybe in a beer softball league, but there aren`t any around here that I know of), that naturally leads me to the next best thing which is my baseball card collection.

This is all just a roundabout way of saying that I have officially kicked off my 2014 collecting campaign.

 This is several weeks early for the 2014 Calbee baseball cards, which I am eagerly awaiting the appearance of on my local convenience store shelves (or stores I should say, there are about 7 convenience stores within walking distance of my place.  As I am fond of saying, we live in a very convenient location).  So for now I am satisfied to dust off my sets from years past and see what I need.

I have never actually succesfully completed a Calbee set.  I think the only sets I have ever actually completed in my life were some Topps and Donruss sets from 1989 and 1990.  Except for those I have a ton of 90-95% complete sets that I could never be bothered finishing.

The closest I am to finishing a Calbee set would be the 2009 one, which is pictured at the top of this post.  I only need 22 more of the regular cards to complete it, plus about 30 of the subset cards and inserts.  I am going to make an honest try at finishing that this year.

This 600 card box here has all my other Calbee sets from 2008 - 2013 (minus the 2009 set).   If you can do the math you will realize that means I have just over 100 cards each from those years, well fewer than half of each set.  I will try to work on those too.

One thing that I hope to avoid this year is what happened to me last year when trying to piece together the 2013 set.  When series 1 came out all of the convenience stores in my area had bags of them.  Then when series 2 came out they had them for about 2 weeks and then - poof!  They vanished.  Not just from one convenience store but from every one of them.  Even the ones near my work, which had also carried the series 1 cards, stopped carrying them.  And series 3?  I never saw a bag of them in any of my convenience stores.  The only place that I could get them at was at the big Max Value supermarket, which I hardly ever go to.  As a consequence, while I put together a lot of my 2013 series 1 set bag by bag, I only got about 4 or 5 bags of Series 2 and a grand total of 1 bag of series 3.  Much to my shame, I had to turn to Yahoo Auctions to satisfy my need for those series, which to my mind constitutes a form of cheating (though I do it all the time).

 I don`t know if that was the same in other parts of Japan or only a Nagoya thing.  In general it seems like Series 1 Calbees are usually a lot easier to find than the higher series, which is an interesting echo of how things worked in North America back in the 50s and 60s when Topps would cut down the print runs with each series as the season wore on and interest waned.  I hope Calbee doesn`t do that this year, I really enjoy being able to buy a bag of baseball card ships whenever I want to, even in September or October!

Anyway, the 2014 collecting (and blogging) year has officially begun!!